


A Very McClane Christmas

by persnickett



Category: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Genre: Community: smallfandomfest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-06 14:01:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5419730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persnickett/pseuds/persnickett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It took Matt two whole seconds after he saw him come pelting out of the building to realize that McClane didn’t have enough time to get clear before the charges blew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Very McClane Christmas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ArwenOak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArwenOak/gifts).



> For smallfandomfest in response to the prompt "family traditions", and for ArwenOak, who asked ~~if~~ when these two got together, which one Lucy would give the “if you hurt him” speech to.

His ears are still ringing. Won’t stop. 

It took Matt two whole seconds after he saw him come pelting out of the building to realize that McClane didn’t have enough time to get clear before the charges blew. 

It took him less than one whole second after that to make the awesome non-decision to abandon his post and start running. It wasn’t a decision so much as an instinct, Matt figures on reflection, running into an exploding building. The brief wash of relief at seeing John’s escaping form alive in the distance was replaced by a tight, airless fight-or-flight feeling behind his eyes that left little room for thought. He didn’t know what he would do when he got to McClane, he just knew that he had to get there. 

He didn’t, though. Even from this distance, Matt could see that McClane knew that he had made it out too late too. He threw an arm up over his face as he fled; strong legs pounding the ground like pistons. Matt ran too. 

He ran, and he watched – the nitro packs going off in tight, perfect sequence, the dust billowing up and out of the ground, rushing out from the crumbling brick and beam in a thick, choking cloud and swallowing McClane from sight. Matt kept running. And then the speeding edge of the shock radius took him off his feet and into unconsciousness.

If the ringing in his ears would just—  
Matt pulls on his earlobes, tries to make them pop. Nothing. He runs his hands through his hair in irritation, tries pressing on his eyelids instead, as if that will help. Weirdly, it sort of does though. His eyes are kind of aching, a feeling he’s not unused to, being a guy who makes a living staring at screens and all. But he may have been forgetting to blink. That’s been happening. 

McClane doesn’t look so bad, he supposes, for somebody who was just blown up. The cuts and abrasions on his face are all cleaned up and there are some steri-strips in a couple of places, just holding the old guy together. Arm in a sling, which when you knew McClane, was actually almost a semi-normal state for him. IV in the arm, sure. The docs have him on the good stuff, and he’s been sleeping a while. 

That’s pretty much the extent of Matt’s recon for the moment. He hasn’t lifted the blankets to check if they’ve got one or both of his legs in a cast under there or anything. That seems like it would be too… Well, he hasn’t. 

Mostly he’s just been sitting here, watching McClane’s profile – the way his forehead curves right into the naked, shaven dome of his skull, the slightly hawkish arc to his nose. 

Matt looks down at the sheets, remembers to blink this time. He knows he’s staring, but he’s not really trying all that hard not to. He never gets the chance when John’s awake. 

The juice in the IV is turned down low enough that McClane clearly still has dreams – a good sign, or at least Matt hopes. Every now and then his forehead creases or a fist clenches against the sheets. Matt leans forward onto the mattress when it happens, folding his arms and sometimes even putting his chin or his cheek down on top of them. It’s not like it’s going to offer any comfort or anything really, but it’s…closer. 

It’s a bit like watching a dog chase rabbits in his sleep, except McClane’s catching bullets with his bare hands, or twisting terrorist’s AK-47s into pretzels, probably. He mutters things sometimes too, but nothing intelligible. Mostly Matt just tries not to imagine hearing what just might be his name, floating around there in the random syllable soup. 

His ears just seriously are _not_ right…

He’s still sitting like that when McClane’s eyes open. 

“Hey,” Matt says, hastily gathering himself up off McClane’s bed, and leaning back as much as he can manage in his straight-backed little hospital chair. “Welcome to the world of the living.”

“Thanks kid,” McClane says weakly, sounding like he means it a little more than Matt really had. “Hey, come ‘ere.”

Matt sits up obediently straight, but McClane beckons him forward even further. 

“Can’t really—” He coughs, and it sounds bad. Wet. “Can’t seem to… talk so loud,” McClane rasps, stopping in the middle for a wheezy breath. 

“You sucked in a lot of dust,” Matt explains. “And…smoke,” he says, not sure why his voice is sounding suddenly almost as rough as McClane’s does. 

McClane nods and Matt turns around, which is handy for hiding the way his eyes seem to have started prickling dangerously behind the lids, and drags his chair a little closer to the bed. But whatever McClane was about to say is cut off by a coughing fit that has Matt out of the chair and reaching for his elbow. 

“Do I need to call the nurse?”

“No,” John rasps. Coughs again. His hand comes down over Matt’s, where it’s sitting on the crook of his arm, to keep him from going anywhere. “No, dammit. Just…” he says, making a visible effort to soften his tone, “just sit down, come back over here.”

Matt sits. He takes his hands away from McClane and folds them neatly on the edge of the bed again. He keeps his head up this time.

McClane looks at him. “Did we get it?” 

Matt scoffs. Always on the job. “Well, _you_ got it, but yeah. They may have taken out the archive, but everything we needed was on the microdisk anyway,” Matt laughs, and it sounds weird. Far away and hollow, somehow. “…Bowman said you must have been thrown thirty feet in the air, but they found you face down with the damn thing still clenched in your fist like some kind of crazy Vulcan death grip…” Matt’s eyes are pricking again. He reminds himself to blink. To breathe. “The plans are with the cypher team now…they probably have it cracked already.”

“The geek squad? You didn’t crack it at the site like we—the hell happened to your face?”

“Oh, that…” Matt pulls back a little, just as McClane’s hand moves on the sheets like he might have been about to reach out. 

Matt hasn’t actually seen his face. They had him all patched up in the ambulance by the time he even made it to the hospital, and he wouldn’t let them admit him. He still had to get to McClane. 

And now he’s here, and he still doesn’t know what he was planning to do when he did. 

“Did Bowman send you in?” John asks, moving like he’s trying to sit up but it isn’t quite working out for him. “We agreed on a plan! You were supposed to be out of th—“ McClane starts coughing again, but then he stops before Matt can jump out of his seat and escape with the very justifiable excuse of finding every last nurse in the place.

“No!” Matt says, putting his hands up in a placating gesture. “Okay? No.” McClane is looking mutinous and fingering the fabric of his sling like he is bent on getting out of that bed and kicking some ass, even if he has to do it one-handed and on a respirator. “He didn’t send me in.”

Matt looks down at his hands, hanging his head. “I broke rank.” He isn’t proud of it. It was reckless and it was pointless, to boot. But it was worse than that too, somehow. 

He’s supposed to be the smart one. Take away Matt’s brains, and what good is he? Well, in the sense that if you took away anyone’s brain they wouldn’t be good for much, being dead and all, but without his smarts, Matt sort of feels like he might as well be. Take away his gift for reasoning and powers of problem solving and really, what have you got? He’s weak, physically speaking. He’s weedy and scrawny and gets short of breath going anywhere with more than three flights of stairs. Socially he’s not much better. He’s sarcastic in a way that most people don’t get, but he can’t seem to control, which has the strangest effect of pushing folks away. 

But not John. 

Matt looks back up and McClane’s already thin lips are a tight, severe line. 

“Come ’ere,” he says again. 

And Matt is so scared of what McClane will do if he doesn’t – whether it’s jumping out of bed and murdering him with his IV pole or just launching into one of those terrifying-as-fuck coughing fits again – he leans right down until his chest is resting against the edge of the mattress and folds his hands in front of him again. 

“Jesus,” McClane whispers, and Matt has no idea what he he’s seeing, but McClane’s free hand moves again, and this time he does reach up, put his fingertips softly to Matt’s cheek.

Well, shit. Matt shuts his eyes and takes a breath in.

“Sorry kid, that hurt?” John murmurs and Matt shakes his head, because it does, but that’s nothing to do with John. It’s the stinging under his eyelids and the searing heat in his throat and his ears won't stop ringing and Matt. Just. Can’t. He can’t make words happen, not right now. And then McClane whispers “what in the hell were you thinking…”

Matt huffs out a laugh and it fucking _burns_ his throat is so tight.

Matt had a lot of time to prepare for this. While he was sitting here bedside, staring like the creepster whackjob he totally obviously is. There are myriad macho cracks to be made – about fetching him coffee for a month, or who’s going to do his dirty work if McClane bites it, but none of those words will come. All his brain seems to have room for is the same neurotic shit that was spinning and spinning through it on a loop the whole time he’s been here. 

“I wasn’t,” Matt says finally. “I wasn’t thinking. I was…”

“Doing,” McClane says knowingly.

Just as Matt finishes “…Feeling.”

McClane’s fingers have been moving over the apparently ravaged landscape of his face for a while but now they go still. Waiting for an explanation.

“You were dying. As far as I knew. And I…” Matt stops and sighs, but McClane doesn’t say anything to rescue him so there’s nothing to do but push on. 

“Without you, I am _literally_ nothing. Literally the person sitting here would not be… The day we met – the first fucking day – you saved my life…I…can you even count? Have you tried? I would be blown up in my apartment, and I would be shot by Gabriel’s snipers, and I would be squashed by a…a, a fucking flying car, and I would be executed by that bitch Mai, and I mean, even if none of that—“

“Matthew…” McClane says quietly, but the thing is, there’s more.

“Okay so I’m alive,” Matt concedes. “But my _life_? My life, how it is, I owe you that too McClane. Yes,” he argues, when McClane’s fingers stiffen like he might be about to disagree. “I do. I’m Matt Farrell, Tech Specialist now. And that’s not just a title – no it is. I have a _title_ McClane! And a role. As a field agent I _do_ things – things that help my country – things that matter. _I_ matter. And without you I can’t…”

“You can.” McClane interrupts. His fingers move again, sliding under Matt’s chin and nudging until Matt is looking him in the eye. “You’re amazing, Matt. You can do anything.”

“I—“

“Shut up,” McClane orders. “I do what I do and it works for me – but how many options you think I got? I’m a just knucklehead cop who ain’t afraid to get a little dirty. And the only reason I’m still alive’s I’m quick on the trigger. But you? Amazing,” John says again. “Smart. But what you did, running in there, that was stupid. You don’t need this job, you can do anything you set your mind on. You don’t need me as much as you think.”

McClane leaves his hand under Matt’s chin to let the point sink in, but he leans back into the pillows a little, like talking that much made him tired. 

Matt shakes his head as best he can without dislodging McClane’s grip. “Opposite,” he says. “Turns out I do. I do need you. And it’s…" Oh boy, he is really doing this. Out loud. "It's actually a lot _more_ than I thought.”

“Yeah?” McClane asks, and his thumb runs along the line of Matt’s jaw appraisingly. “I get that.”

“You do?”

“Feelin’s mutual, kid.” John’s thumb moves up now, grazing along the edge of Matt’s lip.

Damn. Matt has imagined this moment more times than he’s likely to admit. So it’s a reasonable concern, when a sharp sliver of doubt flashes through his mind, that he could be imagining it now. 

He nudges forward into the touch, testing. McClane just smirks. 

And damn, but _damn_ , if there is a way to be sexy in a hospital gown, all covered in stitches and plugged into a morphine drip, trust McClane to find it. 

“Fuck it,” Matt says, leaning forward out of his chair.

McClane gives a low, dirty chuckle that makes Matt want to do things that are likely to make McClane’s heart monitor go haywire, and then—

A voice from the hall abruptly reminds him that the thing about hospitals is they are full of people who aren’t him and John McClane.

“Merry merry, jingle jingle, blah blah!”

Not just any voice. Lucy’s voice. And Matt jumps back so hard his chair clatters to the floor. 

Thankfully his flailing attempt at retrieving it puts his back to Lucy long enough to let his flaming cheeks cool off a little. When he turns around, doing his best not to look guilty, Lucy has a bottle of water in one hand and a soda in the other.

“Daddy,” she says by way of greeting, placing the bottle on his bedside table, and a kiss on his cheek.

“Spaz,” she greets Matt formally, holding out the soda for him to take. 

“You came prepared…” Matt notes, cracking his drink and cocking an eyebrow at the pile of bags now littering the bed.

“When you’ve been through as many of these as I have…” Lucy shrugs. “Hell, this is pretty much our family tradition.”

“Right,” Matt nods. “The famous curse.” His brain is busily trying to switch gears from McClane-almost-kissage to risk-of-death-by-vengeful-daughter so he can be excused for pretty much forgetting the date. 

McClane gives a weary sigh. “There’s no _curse_ …”

“Seriously??” 

This last from both of them, Matt gesturing at McClane and his sling with his soda can, while Lucy spreads her hands over the array of supplies spilled out over the bedcovers.

“Get ready for Christmas Dinner McClane-style,” she says, changing the subject. She starts to pick through the stash and sort it into organized piles. “Playing cards from the gift shop, trashy waiting room magazines, and the four vending machine food groups: potato, nacho, pretzel aaaaaand let’s not forget chocolate.” 

Matt watches Lucy take the cap off McClane’s water and put it in his good hand. She reaches into one of the bags on the bed and pulls out a soda of her own.

“To traditions!” she toasts, holding up her can. McClane smiles and they all raise their drinks. It’s kind of cozy, Matt thinks – in a totally twisted, life-endangerment, McClane kind of way of course. But it’s sweet of Lucy to be here. 

…As much as Matt kind of wishes she wasn’t. 

Lucy swallows her mouthful of soda and starts making conversation. “Of course, it’s also the custom for me to walk in on some totally inappropriate sloppy parental makeout, too. So at least—"

Matt isn’t sure what McClane’s face does because his gaze is suddenly firmly fixed on the ugly terrazzo floor, but he can hear him clear his throat. 

“Oh,” Lucy says. “Oh. Don’t even.” 

Yup. Death-by-vengeful-daughter imminent. Matt peeks up from the floor through his bangs, but keeps his head lowered. Lucy is looking back and forth between them like she can’t decide who to dispatch first. 

“Dad!”

Phew.

“He started it…” McClane mutters.

“Mature, McClane,” Matt mutters back.

Lucy shoots Matt a look but turns back to John with a gesture at Matt like he has just proved her point by existing. “DAD.”

But now, unbelievably, both McClanes seem to be trying not to smirk. Double phew.

“I KNEW it,” she bursts out. “I _told_ Jack. If you started working together, it was a matter of— wait, how long exact— you know what? Nope. Don’t actually want to know. We’re done here,” Lucy says, putting down her drink. “You officially have the room to yourselves for exactly one hour.”

Matt tries to think of a better way to phrase the fact that they haven’t actually even gotten to the sloppy makeout part yet, but Lucy is still talking. 

“Good luck, Dad," she goes on, bending down and retrieving her purse from the floor. "You’re dealing with a guy whose idea of a date is ordering in Thai and then ignoring you for three hours while you watch him play Dr Mario.”

“I—those were dates!?” Matt squawks, with a nervous glance at McClane. Who is just smirking down at the snack pile on the bed like he can’t choose between the potato and pretzel groups. And still looking impossibly sexy somehow, damn him.

Lucy looks at Matt, pointing a finger sideways at McClane. “Divorced,” she says, instead of giving him a response. “Twice. From _the same person_.”

Then she must catch the way Matt is looking at how a little patch of silver-foxy chest hair is just peeking over the collar of John’s hospital gown because she stops lecturing and says “ugh, gross.” 

She’s grinning when she says it though. Triple phew.

“One hour,” Lucy says again, checking her watch and reaching over the bed to filch all the best stuff out of the nacho food group. “Use it wisely. If anyone needs me I’ll be at the nurses’ station, working on the final McClane holiday tradition: stealing their industrial size jar of hand sanitizer and wandering the halls in search of a doctor who can _rub it on my brain_.” 

“Thanks honey,” McClane says quietly.

“Thank you sanitizer,” Lucy says sweetly, patting him on the knee and heading for the door.

Matt can’t believe it. He’s been blown up, seriously nearly successfully macked on McClane, got busted by Lucy… and survived it all.

But then Lucy turns back when she reaches the door. He's not out of the woods yet. 

“Oh. And if you hurt him…” she points a finger at John, and one at Matt, criss-crossing them in the air to indicate there is equal opportunity death on the table, here. She points both those fingers at her eyeballs in the classic signal for ‘I’m watching you, asshole’, and disappears.

Triple, quadruple, infinity phew. 

He looks at McClane, and McClane is definitely looking at him, and there’s something new in his gaze that suddenly has Matt’s jeans feeling just a little tight.

It sure is quiet in here. Even the ringing in his ears seems much duller, and Matt wonders for a second if he may have actually gone deaf.

He clears his throat, and can hear it just fine. Just the awkwardness that’s deafening then.

“So…an hour to live,” Matt says. 

“Yeah,” McClane agrees. Sexy smirk. Dammit. 

Matt clears his throat again, and this time it actually sounds a little too loud. “Game of ‘Go Fish'?" Matt asks. “Enquirer?” He leans forward and starts sifting through the trashy magazine portion of the McClane Christmas fare. 

“That your idea of ‘using it wisely’?”

“Oh. That. Well see… don’t get me wrong, I am totally on board. You…are…in for a treat, mister. I mean, all this, right?” Matt waves his hands over his scrawny torso in a way that is probably anything but beguiling. “I got mad skills, dude. But you’re in kind of a delicate state right now, and…”

“Yeah,” McClane interrupts. “That and you’re afraid my little girl will come in here and kick your ass if I pull a stitch.” Smirk. Goddamn, it’s adorable.

“You haven’t played her at Call of Duty McClane. I have just cause, okay?”

McClane laughs that low chuckle again and Matt’s eyes move over him, snag on that patch of chest hair again. 

“I was thinkin’ maybe a nap,” McClane says, clearly catching the direction of his gaze as quickly as Lucy had.

“Oh. Oh yeah, that’s. Of course, yeah. That’s what I meant too. Serious nap-supervising skills. What’d you think I meant? …Perv.” Matt doesn’t point out that he’d been practicing them for hours today while McClane slept. “Go ahead. Literally knock yourself out, I think there’s a morphine infuser button on your IV there…”

McClane just smiles. 

“You look like you could use one,” he says, pushing the snack bags aside to clear a place next to him on the mattress. 

Matt eyes it skeptically even though his head is ringing and his eyes do hurt. “This better not be a ploy to get me into your bed, Detective. I know what you’re up to, with that sexy smirking thing, and the smoky laugh. I’m onto you." 

“C’mon kid. I saw you trying to catch a little catnap when I woke up, there.”

“Oh yeah,” Matt laughs nervously. “When I was— yeah, no. I wasn’t sleeping, so much as, just…”

“So much as watching me sleep?” McClane asks, knowingly. 

“What?” Matt says with a derisive snort. “Watching you sleep? …Yes. That is exactly what I was doing,” he says honestly. 

McClane smirks again. He’s just doing that on purpose now. 

“I might be a little bit in love with you, you know,” Matt blurts. And wow, maybe he should have taken McClane up on that nap thing. His brain has obviously given up all pretense of doing any work whatsoever.

McClane’s smirk goes full grin, and he ducks his chin like a schoolboy, looks back down at the snack pile. “Good,” he says. “Now put your head down, Perv.”

Matt gives up the fight, folds his arms over the edge of McClane’s bed, and puts his cheek down. He fully expects to see that annoyingly alluring smirk swimming in front of his eyes when he closes them, but instead the image he gets is the one of John ducking his head and indulging that private little smile. Matt made John McClane blush. Maybe he really could do anything he set his mind on. 

Matt feels stroking fingers at his nape, and a deep shiver races down his spine. A rough thumb traces the shell of his ear, and goosebumps are _everywhere_. 

“McClane?” Matt says without opening his eyes, and his voice does sound kind of sleepy. 

“Hmm?”

“When you touch me, it um, kind of has these…effects…”

“Good,” McClane says again.

“Yeah,” Matt agrees, because _yeah_. But… “it’s not all that conducive to sleep.”

McClane gives that low sensual laugh, and it feels like a pinky finger dips in under the collar of his tshirt and this time it is definitely on purpose. Matt can feel warmth rising in his cheeks that spreads down his neck, and lower, and he’s pretty sure McClane can see it.

“John… If you don’t stop, then an hour from now Lucy’s going to walk in on a lot worse than she did last time.”

“Alright,” he says, and there’s still laughter in his voice. But the teasing petting stops and Matt feels those strong fingers move into his hair, stroking gently. “Better?”

“No,” Matt says. “So yes. Thank you.”

Another deep smoky chuckle. This time the warmth spreading over his skin is kind of nice. His head is still ringing and his eyes feel much, much better when they are closed, and the movement of McClane’s fingers through his hair has gone rhythmic and hypnotic.

“McClane?” Matt says. He’s so close to drifting off, even his own voice sounds vague and far off. “Merry Christmas.”

“Love you too, kiddo,” John says back.

“Good,” Matt totally means to say. But he might already be asleep.


End file.
